Police: Man accidentally shoots toddler daughter

A father accidentally wounded his 16-month-old daughter Friday night at a home in the Clearwater community in western Glynn County.

A bullet striking the girl in the left calf from what the man thought was an unloaded rifle, according to a county police report.

The girl rode with her mother by ambulance to Southeast Georgia Health System’s Brunswick hospital for treatment of the wound, according to the report.

The man told police he was inspecting the assault-style rifle while standing inside an open closet, while his daughter sat at a computer desk on the other side of the upstairs bedroom when the accident occurred around 6:46 p.m., the report said. The man said there was no ammo magazine attached the gun and that “he didn’t see any rounds in the chamber,” the report said.

The man said the gun went off when he moved the slide forward into the chamber, the report said. The toddler immediately began screaming and the man took her out of the room and handed her to the mother, unaware that the girl had been struck, according to the report.

He returned to the room to search for a bullet hole when “his wife began yelling that (the girl) had been shot,” the report said. The man wrapped the girl’s bleeding leg in a towel while the mother called 911, the report said.

Police found “a live round and a spent round” on the floor in the closet and detected a bullet hole through the computer desk and the wall behind it, the report said.

The morning after being escorted from an Islands Planning Commission meeting in handcuffs by a Glynn County Police officer, Julian Smith said he was in good cheer, and didn’t mind being escorted out “as horrified citizens looked on,” he said.